India's Airport Boom Embraces Green Building

Six years ago, I was waiting at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi’s International Airport, hoping to get out to Hyderabad on the final flight of the night. Due to Delhi’s infamous winter “fog,” which is partially due to people burning trash for heat, many flights had been canceled. The terminal was tiny and dirty, with no place for the many delayed passengers to sit. Tempers flared. One Indian got so irate that he stormed behind the ticketing desk and shoved a computer to the floor.

Imagine my surprise when I landed up in Delhi last week from Kochi and found a vast, clean, totally modern airport. In fact, the New Delhi redo is part of a massive effort over the past five years to upgrade most of India’s airports, said Satyaki Raghunath, managing director - Asia for LeighFisher, a management consulting firm that has worked closely on India’s airport overhauls. (Disclosure: Satyaki is a friend.)

Green building techniques are increasingly becoming the norm worldwide, especially on large, government-affiliated projects, and India’s new airports show evidence of this trend. Of course, air travel is the most carbon-intensive form of transportation, so an airport boom can’t be considered good for the environment. But if new airports are to be built, and India clearly needs them, they might as well be as green as possible.

Terminal 3 at New Delhi’s airport opened in July 2010 and was the world's first — and largest — terminal building to win green building’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold certification. It earned the label by meeting standards developed by the Indian Green Building Council, the local chapter of U.S. Green Building Council, which created LEED standards. (Here I must give a shout-out to my hometown San Francisco International Airport, whose Terminal 2 also won gold certification, soon after Delhi did.) Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad also won a LEED-Silver rating.

Raghunath explained to me why India is undergoing an airport building boom. Indian air traffic was run exclusively by government carriers for decades and only opened up to private companies in the early ’90s. “There was competition for the first time,” he said. “Prices started coming down. And most important, the Indian low-cost carrier arrived in 2003 with the advent of Air Deccan.”

Around the same time, the Indian economy started taking off, and “a whole lot more people started flying.”

In the year 1999-2000, total domestic and international air traffic across India was about 38 million passengers, according to the Airports Authority of India. The year 2010-11 saw more than 143 million.

With passengers more than tripling in a single decade, existing airlines started buying new planes and new airlines began operations, but the infrastructure lagged far behind. “The authorities realized that airlines had ordered about 400 planes, and there was no place to park them,” said Raghunath.

“In the U.S., if traffic grows at 3 to 4 percent a year, airports struggle because it’s difficult to deliver infrastructure to meet those growth levels. In India, traffic was growing at 15 to 25 percent annually, depending on the airport. When that happened for 3 to 4 years in a row, the government realized it had to do something.”

“Something” was to get the private sector involved, focusing primarily on the airports with the most traffic: Mumbai (Bombay), New Delhi, Bengaluru (Bangalore), Hyderabad, and Kochi (Cochin) airports are now operated on a 30(+30) year concession through public-private partnerships and have seen the most dramatic change. GMR, based in Bengaluru, operates New Delhi and Hyderabad. GVK, based in Hyderabad, operates Mumbai and Bengaluru.

Most other airports in India are owned by the government and operated by the Airports Authority of India (AAI), including two other high-traffic airports, Chennai (Madras) and Kolkata (Calcutta). “The AAI has also been reasonably active and doing modernization work at various other airports,” said Raghunath.

The results in Delhi didn’t just wow me. The LEED-Gold rating is a significant achievement in a country where many things are GINO (green in name only).

New Delhi’s Terminal 3 green provisions include:

Day lighting.

A/C set a bit warm; no sweaters required!

Use of construction materials with recycled content and recycling of construction waste.

Use of alternative vehicles such as battery operated and CNG, supported by electric charging stations and a CNG refueling station.

A metro line to provide public transit to the airport.

Water management through rainwater harvesting and storm water absorption; on-site, reverse-osmosis treatment for drinking water; and on-site wastewater treatment and reuse for toilet flushing, A/C units, horticulture, and construction

Air-quality management with measures to reduce emissions from aircraft, vehicles, auxiliary power units (APUs) and ground power units (GPU).

But beneath the sheen at Terminal 3, the local and international luxury stores, the restaurants, the grandeur of scale, I noticed some shoddy, already failing construction. The dual-flush toilet I used had a cheap, plastic flushing mechanism that was already broken. On my walk down the corridor to board my plane home, I saw loose and chipped wall tiles. Obviously, needing to replace materials before their expected lifetimes is not particularly green.

But Raghunath pointed out that the first phase at New Delhi, including Terminal 3, was built at a breakneck pace, driven by penalties if it wasn’t completed ahead of the Delhi-hosted 2010 Commonwealth Games. At 5.4 million square feet, Delhi’s Terminal 3 is among the largest buildings in the world. “They built a new runway and two terminals, including Terminal 3, in three years: 37 months, start to finish,” said Raghunath. “It was an insane pace rarely seen before in the world.”